Tag: rugby

It’s been a long, hot day at the Sevens in Cape Town with the boy. We left just after 9 in the morning, we got home just after 9 in the evening, I’ve been doing some rudimentary calculations and I make that about 12 hours.
And I think he had fun, despite not being the most sporting of types.

I have a few photos (from my phone, I didn’t take the camera), and a few thoughts (as ever), but I’m simply too tired right now.

So goes the playground-style oneup[person]ship on social media and at braais and even occasionally at the Molton Brown Curry Club.

I don’t usually get involved.

My sport is football, and I understand that it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Additionally, I also recognise that football has its faults. I’ve been telling the authorities how to sort them out for years and years. Thankfully, it looks like they’ve finally begun to listen.

Finally, some progress being made to make football less laughable.

Meanwhile in rugby (so often the sporting bastion of the anti-footy pisstakers) they’re heading the other way.

Yep – next time some egg-chaser has a pop at my favourite sport, I might just bite back by showing them this… this… utter mess.

That’s the final Super 18 table for this season, and beagle-eyed readers will not amusing little cameos like the fourth placed Brumbies having 34 points and the fifth placed Hurricanes having 58.

That’s really not how leagues should work.

At least football is working to stamp out its problems. Local rugby bosses are compounding and exacerbating their troubles and generally trashing their sport, season by season.

It’s both sad and hilarious to watch (which is something that fewer and fewer fans are doing, unsurprisingly).

I extracted the SD card from the camera to upload the photos from this weekend’s Cape Town 7s experience and was immediately confronted by all (or more) of the photos I took last weekend. These hadn’t been uploaded because the intervening 7 days were chaotically busy.

From there, it was a fairly straightforward leap to yesterday’s amazing day out at the stadium. My photos are here.

Obviously, I don’t know what sort of show the Dubai or Edinburgh or Nuuk (?) 7s put on, but I have to say that what Cape Town does seems to be very well received by all those involved. (Although of course they’re hardly likely to turn around and slag the place off in these days of mutual ego massaging.) The atmosphere was amazing, the entertainment was superb, the rugby was absorbing and even the final was balanced upon a knife-edge right up to the final kick. This being my kids first 7s experience, it was always going to be that way – never forget Alex’s first footy match was a 7-0, and their first cricket match finished with an incredible SA win off the last ball after a missed run out opportunity.

This time around, England were the beneficiaries of the last minute miss, and really the only disappointment of the day was how few people stayed around to see the trophy presentation. ‘Bad losers’ might be a bit harsh, but after the phenomenal support and sporting reception given to all the teams throughout the day, that extra 10 minutes would have made a big difference, especially given just how tight that last game was. Sadly, all the photos of England’s presentation and celebration are against a backdrop of empty seats. That’s not how it was for the previous 9 hours, nor how it should have been for the last ten minutes.

As Tom Mitchell stepped up to take this second half conversion right in front of us, I remarked on how important it was going to be, and so it proved, being the 2 point difference between the teams at the end.

South Africa were a major disappointment under new coach Allister Coetzee and new captain Adriaan Strauss, looking lethargic for much of the game, but Ireland cared little as captain Rory Best hailed his side’s “massive physical performance”.